With the advent of smartphones, and ever wider employment of such devices by users, problems have developed due to the handling of such devices by users. While in years past, smartphones were not much bigger or heavier than flip phones and similar cell phones, due to the improvements in battery life and video interface technology, smartphones have evolved to more sizeable hand-held computers. Along with this increase and size and the enhanced graphics provided thereby, has come an increase in weight, as well as an increase in the grasping requirements of a user holding a modern smartphone device.
While cell phones in the past could be held on the shoulder or easily just held to the ear of the user, smartphones further provide a video display which gives the user an input device to operate the phone. Such requires the user to employ a finger of choice to touch icons, and to scroll depicted screens, and interact and input commands in other screen touching actions. Of course, when one hand is being employed to use a finger which must be precisely positioned or dragged across the smartphone display to use the phone, the other hand must hold the smartphone in a substantially fixed position.
Thus, a hand-holding of the smartphone is required to hold the perimeter edge of the phone to position the video display screen in front of the face of the user for reading. Additionally, as noted, the hand-holding of the smartphone must hold it steady for the precise touching and movements of the other hand interacting with the display to operate the phone.
While holding the phone between the thumb and fingers contacting opposing sides of the smartphone would seem like a common manner to hold such devices, such a grip does not always work well. One reason is the weight of such smartphones can easily fatigue the hand holding the smartphone tight enough to prevent it from falling from the muscular imparted compression between the thumb and fingers of the holding hand. As the hand tires of such gripping pressure, especially during extended periods of use, the muscles tend to relax, and such can cause the phone to easily slip for the grip of the user.
As a consequence, many smartphone users have adopted a non ergonomic grip on the phone, where the smallest finger on the hand, is curved underneath the bottom edge of the smartphone, to support the weight of the phone. While this hand configuration allows the user to grip the opposing sides less tightly, since the phone is resting on the small finger, holding the smartphone in this matter for long durations each day, while checking email, surfing the internet, looking at photos, etc., can cause compression as well as other injury to the small finger of the hand holding the smartphone in this manner.
Indeed, there is a physical malady being seen by physicians which has become known as “smartphone pinky finger” which is a term raising multiple results in an internet search. Such results in a permanent curvature of the small finger of the hand, forming the long term curved positioning while supporting the lower edge of a smartphone. In addition to the abnormal curvature caused by damaged ligaments of the finger, the skin and muscles covering the bones of the small finger are also known to suffer from compression injury and essentially visible “dents” in the finger, subsequent to long term use to support a smartphone thereon.
With smartphones getting ever larger as screen and battery technology improves, and with small pad computers being more widely employed instead of laptops, the physical problems suffered by the small finger of the hand supporting such devices for minutes or even hours of use every day, are just getting worse.
The forgoing examples of the hand and finger injuries resulting to the hands of smartphone holders and limitations related therewith, are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive, and they do not imply any limitations on the invention described and claimed herein. Various other limitations of the related art are known or will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon a reading and understanding of the specification below and the accompanying drawings.